"Early childhood educators and social workers can expect to earn around $36,000 and $39,000, respectively. By contrast, petroleum engineering and metallurgy degrees promise median earnings of $120,000 and $80,000. Not many aspiring early childhood educators would change course once they learn they can earn more in metallurgy or mining. The sexes, taken as a group, are somewhat different. Women, far more than men, appear to be drawn to jobs in the caring professions; and men are more likely to turn up in people-free zones. In the pursuit of happiness, men and women appear to take different paths."

ADDED: If working with people is considered a plus, such that job-seekers accept lower pay to have that kind of work, is there a problem? What if job-seekers tended to feel it was bad to have to work with others and avoided these jobs? The pay would go up. I think what we're seeing is that working with people is more likely to be a plus among women, and there are a lot of female job-seekers bidding the price down. You might say this is acceptable because it's not intentional discrimination against women; it's just everyone making individual personal choices, and a neutral market producing this effect. Those who still see a problem and want us to care should find a way to say it still matters, because the skewed preferences of women are leading to a disparate impact. I just wish they'd say that clearly and be accurate about the facts and not continually prod people to feel that there are nefarious employers deliberately short-changing women.

"How can this strain of puritanism endure in the same city that pioneered the kinky hollowed parade? It was bad enough with New York City went all Rick Santorum on Eliot Spitzer to begin with. He's only the guy who arguably did more to reform Wall Street than any other American. Yeah, his libido got the best of him and he paid dearly for it. A brilliant man was reduced to a punchline and banished from public life. But now, anybody he touches has to go?"

Said Bill Maher on his show last night, criticizing Bill de Blasio, "a man so liberal he married a black lesbian," for rejecting a woman seemingly because she was dating Eliot Spitzer — "Lis Smith who ran Mayor Bill de Blasio's communications department in last year's campaign was all set to take over the job that she earned as his top spokesman." How do you "earn" a job as someone else's spokesperson? De Blasio gets to pick the person who speaks for him. If he didn't want to get any Spitzer on him, he's entitled.

Hard to tell if these are right-wingers risking attempting to use the kind of third-rate humor that breeds on Twitter or whether non-white feminists are advancing in what Goldberg called the "toxic twitter war" amongst the feminists.

Whatever it is, it's not very funny, and I don't think conservatives have anything to gain by inserting themselves in an intrafeminist conflict, especially if they're feeling they've got something funny to say. As the feminist in the light bulb joke said: "That's not funny."

If you're enjoying this blog, please consider doing your on-line shopping through The Althouse Amazon Portal. If you go into Amazon through that link — which is also always in the banner at the top of this blog — and complete a purchase before clicking away, you will be directing a percentage of the purchase price to this blog, at no extra cost to you. Thanks to everyone who's been doing this.

If you're looking for suggestions, here's the slow cooker we just got that we like. And here's the main camera I've been using. And the bag — a men's bag — that i use to carry my casebook around in.

Burke, a former Trek Bicycle Corp. executive and member of the Madison school board, is running her first statewide campaign in an attempt to dim Walker's rising political stardom. She already has tapped $400,000 of her personal wealth on the effort.

Maybe that paragraph was just sloppily written, but it seems to say that the goal of defeating Walker is understood to be out of reach. There's nothing but an attempt/effort to diminish Walker's stature and impede his ability to run for President.

Is she simply a placeholder to avert the humiliation of no opponent for Walker and because she has her own money? But if it's so obvious that I'm asking that right now, it is humiliating.

ADDED: State Rep. Brett Hulsey, D-Madison says:

“If the president comes to your state and you’re running for governor, you drop what you’re doing and go. That’s just politics 101... The picture of her standing next to Obama (would have helped) her, especially because most people in Wisconsin don’t know her.”

Hulsey, who last year said Burke had the personality of a turnip, tweeted “@MaryBurkeGov is too chicken to greet @PresidentObamaB, #toochicken to repeal Act 10, #toochicken to be governor too?”

But Hulsey himself remains noncommittal about whether he’ll run for re-election, and if so, whether he would do so as a Democrat or independent. He also won’t rule out a possible long-shot gubernatorial bid.

Oh, really? Click on the Brett Hulsey link if the name's not familiar and you want to know why Meade laughed when I read "He also won’t rule out a possible long-shot gubernatorial bid" out loud.

As for Politics 101, maybe Politics 102 says when a candidate avoids appearing alongside the President, it means she strongly believes that the picture would not help her.

[A]rt history isn’t a major naive kids fall into because they’ve heard a college degree — any college degree — will get you a good job... [I]t’s famously elitist.... It’s stereotypically a field for prep school graduates, especially women, with plenty of family wealth to fall back on. In fact, a New York Times analysis of Census data shows that art history majors are wildly overrepresented among those in the top 1 percent of incomes. Perhaps the causality runs from art history to high incomes, but I doubt it.

That is, it's not that studying art history leads to a high-paying job, but that people who are already in a very affluent social class choose this major and then do very well exploiting pathways that exist for them because of pre-existing wealth.

"I am an angry black man," Reverend Alex Gee said. "Why would you think I wasn't angry over what is happening in and to my community? Is it because I put on my best face and 'safe' black voice for you today?"

Although the average age at which current United States retirees say they stopped working is 61, up from 59 in 2003 and 57 in 1993, a January Gallup poll of 1,929 members of that generation found that 49 percent didn’t expect to retire until age 66 or older.

My first thought was: I'm surprised that the retirement age has been that low. Only 61 now, and not that long ago it was 57?

But then I see "retirees say they stopped working" and perceived the subtle merger of the idea of deliberately retiring (because you want and can afford it) and the involuntary loss of work (which becomes a permanent condition of retirement). And it's an average, so they're adding the people who keep working because they like it or because they need the money and who can't be forced out (because age discrimination is illegal) with those who lost their jobs and wanted to replace them but failed.

[CORRECTION: No, it's 50 years ago on February 9th. I'm writing too early in the morning and misreading the notation on my calendar. Today, is the 50th anniversary of The Beatles first hitting #1 in the U.S.]

.... and you're probably seeing lots of clips of the very familiar part of the show when The Beatles stamped the look of 1964 into our permanent memory, including the second-hand memory of those yet to be born, but do you remember what the evening of February 1, 1964 really looked liked?

Back then, everyone watched "The Ed Sullivan Show." And there was no fast-forwarding. You had to watch the commercials and whatever mix of performances Ed had for us that week. The TV schedule was studded with "variety shows," and Ed's was the biggest. You could see rock and roll, and your parents could have rock and roll inflicted on them, but you had to listen to opera or jazz and watch plate-spinning acrobats and whatever else Ed had decided was appropriate, including Ed himself, on stage and introducing and vouching for everyone.

I think she expected something that would be at least a little fun, but instead it became a downward spiral of doom. Witness Nancy's nervous tics, jewelry rattling, and her go-to phrase "There's no excuse":

I'd said I was going to to step away from the computer to cook up a second pre-breakfast. Tank said: "Second pre-breakfast?... What are you a Hobbit? Or perhaps feeling a little eleven o'clockish? (It's always eleven o'clockish somewhere)." And I said:

It's one of those mornings. I love the pre-dawn hours, but sometimes it's a mad love. I hope you go on to read the 9 posts that I've already done. There is perhaps an insanity/rationality theme. I don't know, but I'm going to step away from the computer to cook up a second pre-breakfast.

ADDED: This is the view from my window right now, completely unretouched (and showing the computer screen in the dark room):

A lot of parents, unfortunately, maybe when they saw a lot of manufacturing being offshored, told their kids you don't want to go into the trades, you don't want to go into manufacturing because you'll lose your job. Well, the problem is that what happened — a lot of young people no longer see the trades and skilled manufacturing as a viable career. But I promise you, folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art history degree. Now, nothing wrong with an art history degree — I love art history. (Laughter.) So I don't want to get a bunch of emails from everybody. (Laughter.) I'm just saying you can make a really good living and have a great career without getting a four-year college education as long as you get the skills and the training that you need. (Applause.)

1. A "wildly exaggerated sense of risks — a belief that if government is engaging in certain action... it will inevitably use its authority so as to jeopardize civil liberties and perhaps democracy itself." I guess the key word there is "inevitably," or I just don't see what's wildly exaggerated about thinking something like, oh, say, NSA surveillance jeopardizes civil liberties.

2. A "presumption of bad faith on the part of government officials." It's the presuming that's nutty, right? I guess we're allowed to be skeptical of the government without looking crazy. Hey! I'm beginning to feel like Cass Sunstein is the government official and he's in bad faith, trying to make us feel that we're crazy if we suspect the government isn't really all about helping us.

3. A "sense of past, present or future victimization." Should I delete my comment at #2? To be safe? Or does the government already know that comment is there, will still see it even after I delete it, and will count the deletion itself as further evidence of my paranoia, when they decide to round up the paranoid libertarians.

4. The "belief that liberty... is the overriding if not the only value, and that it is unreasonable and weak to see relevant considerations on both sides." The sane people balance values on both sides.

"Piercings of every kind were visible. Women who’d had mastectomies were easy to discern—their chests showed up on our screens as dull, pixelated regions. Hernias appeared as bulging, blistery growths in the crotch area. Passengers were often caught off-guard by the X-Ray scan and so materialized on-screen in ridiculous, blurred poses—mouths agape, à la Edvard Munch. One of us in the I.O. room would occasionally identify a passenger as female, only to have the officers out on the checkpoint floor radio back that it was actually a man. All the old, crass stereotypes about race and genitalia size thrived on our secure government radio channels."

"... and that’s a good argument for not giving him the death penalty.... He would become both a religious martyr, and a civil rights martyr." If, on the other hand, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, is convicted and given a life sentence: "He will live in obscurity in jail and no one will remember him, not in two or three years."

Said Alan Dershowitz, an opponent of the death penalty, making the same points against the death penalty he would always make, and asserting "If [Tsarnaev] doesn’t get the death penalty then no one should."

Prosecutors announced yesterday that they are seeking the death penalty.

Do you agree with Dershowitz that what Tsarnaev is charged with doing is more deserving of the death penalty than anything else you can think of? Or do you think that's not exactly what Dershowitz is saying? Dershowitz thinks no one should get the death penalty, but we'd better have the guts to give it to baby-faced Tsarnaev, or shame on us for accepting the state's imposition of death on all the far less cute convicts at whose photographs we scarcely glance.

[Amanda] Knox said she was relatively fortunate in that she had been able to return to America, and that she was worried for Sollecito. "He's really scared. And really vulnerable. I think he feels abandoned by his own country. Where's he going to run and hide? It's a shame that more people aren't fighting to protect him."

Leaning up against the cement half-walls of the bus stop, jackets pulled up over their cold hands and faces and cigarette butts glowing in the dark, [the SodaStream workers] blame the [Palestinian Authority] for failing to create jobs while taking a political stand against Israeli business that do.

“The PA can say anything it wants and no one will listen because it’s not providing an alternative,” says one man, a 2006 political science graduate of Al Quds University bundled in a jacket bearing the SodaStream logo. As for reports that the company doesn’t honor labor rights, that’s “propaganda,” he says. “Daniel [Birnbaum, the CEO of SodaStream,] is a peacemaker.”

This is in the American news because there's a Scarlett Johansson/Super Bowl ad angle.

"If they went after everyone who did this, there would be no room in jails for murderers," says Alan Dershowitz (about the prosecution of Dinesh D'Souza).

The Justice Department's tactics remind Dershowitz of the words of Stalin's secret police chief, Lavrentiy Beria, who said, "Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime."

"This is an outrageous prosecution and is certainly a misuse of resources," charged Dershowitz. "It raises the question of why he is being selected for prosecution among the many, many people who commit similar crimes. This sounds to me like it is coming from higher places. It is hard for me to believe this did not come out of Washington or at least get the approval of those in Washington."

The towel was a very important part of Turkish social life and continues to be so. Originally, it had many uses such as, for the ceremonial bath of a bride before her wedding and for important occasions later in life. Of course, the hamam also has had an undeniable relationship with these towels, as had the royalty of the Ottoman Empire. The towel would still be a drab piece of cloth were it not for the the intercession of the Ottomans in the 17th century. Especially, thanks must go to the women in the palace that pushed their weavers to make more and more exquisite pieces. They brought style, design and flair to towels....

Read the whole thing. My point isn't suddenly we must learn the history of the towel, it's that I reached a point this morning where I asked myself "What's the history of the towel?" and I expended 5 seconds of my life getting to an answer. Why? Because there's a towel on the floor — recently (not that recently) used to dry off a dog that rolled in the snow — and, instead of picking up the towel — as we did in the olden days — or thinking about picking up the towel — in the manner of more recent times — I'm free-associating about towels, in the jumble of my other random thoughts, which are set to perpetual tumble, powered by the continual availability of the spark of satisfaction that comes from Googling something and getting an answer.

Observes Robin Givhan, describing the absurdly bright colors worn by the female members of Congress at the State of the Union spectacle.

When will the gentlewomen of Congress stop feeling as though they must announce themselves for the cameras, their constituents and their colleagues? How many more women will it take in the upper echelons of Washington before they can all relax, suit up with authority — see Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) — and stop dressing like gumdrops?...

Is every woman wearing bright red? As Obama squeezes in down the aisle, the backdrop of red looks like an array of military personnel from some European country, but it's just the congresswomen, bulging into the aisles. Of course, military personnel would clear a path, not make it more difficult for The Commander to walk by. The congressmen are less showily dressed. What choice do they have? If a male member wore anything other than a dark, neutral color, you'd think he's lost his mind, but the women seem to think they can't look crazy.... Incredible what women can do to themselves and still be taken seriously. Respect the women! You'd better. Or else!

Here's how Givhan describes what Michelle Obama wore:

And, of course, the first lady was the most subdued of all: She chose monochromatic, almost-black pine green, with a full skirt and cropped jacket... by Azzedine Alaia.... The signature cut, with its fitted waist and exuberant skirt, speaks of grace rather than power. Personal preference rather than politics.

The First Lady knew the cameras would focus on her, so she was free to wear any color she chose, and she chose what Robin Givhan called almost-black pine green and what had me doing a Google image search for a bottle fly. The Congresswomen knew they would be dots in a crowd, and both Givhan and I spoke in terms of mental problems. You might think she sounds a lot nicer than I do, but she's the one who perceives the women as having a psychological deficiency that makes them overdo the demand for attention. I was talking about how the viewer accepts women displaying themselves so outlandishly without regarding them as insane.

Both Givhan and I talk about the difference between the way men and women dress. She is saying that the women seem beset by discomfort with the authority they in fact possess, and the arc of progress bends toward a day when, finally relaxed, they wear something more like what the men wear. I'm saying the men are more constrained, by strict fashion convention, by the judgment that would befall them if they deviated — we'd think them nuts if they dressed like Tom Wolfe — controlled for the expectation that they confine themselves to convention, and by the demand that they never let it show that they think the women look ridiculous.

That's Connecticut Congresswoman, Rosa DeLaurio. Respect the woman! You may not laugh! Behind her is Debbie Wasserman Schultz. In my "10 things" post, I wrote:

"Shirley Temple is there," I said, spotting Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and being unfair to Shirley Temple, whose ringlets — as I do an image search this morning — look artlessly subtle and not at all like Debbie's headful of boing-y springs.

My laughing at the woman, there, produced this long column from Neo-Neocon. Purporting to defend Wasserman Schultz, Neo-Neocon relies heavily on the belief that she probably didn't do much to her hair to cause it to look like that:

She’s probably desperate for an “artlessly subtle” look, but that’s probably beyond her powers, or would take so much “doing” for her as to be all-consuming. She’s lucky if her hair doesn’t frizz up into a big puffball or frizz down into a limp and wan collection of wires.

Why is it a defense to say that little work was put into the achievement of the look? Is that a special defense for women or can men get similar support? Seems to me the male members are poofing and puffing whatever they've got and adding fake hair too. In them, we look at the result, and pronounce it ridiculous when it seems ridiculous. We feel perfectly free to point and laugh at this:

Those few curls on a man make us think he's pretty wild. Too nutty to take seriously? What if he let it go a little farther into something more like this:

Mental?! Do you recognize who that is? He's not in politics. Here he is in a younger condition:

One of those hoping for answers is Ovell Krell, whose brother, George Owen Smith, was sent to Dozier in 1940 at the age of 14, allegedly for stealing a car with an older teen. The next year, the family received word that Owen had disappeared from the school and was later found dead of pneumonia. Although his parents asked the school to keep the body at a funeral home so they could retrieve it, the school buried him before they arrived, said Ms. Krell, 85 years old.

Unable to see Owen's body, his mother spent the rest of her life plagued with doubt. "Every night, she sat out on the porch, waiting to see if he could find his way home," Ms. Krell said. "My mother was never the same."

“Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?” Obama asked an Iowa crowd in 2007.... Most people don’t shop at Whole Foods (which specializes in “organic” foods and other environmentally-fashionable products). And most women, I suspect, aren’t looking for a presidential candidate who reminds them more of their high school French teacher than of John F. Kennedy....

It’s not Obama’s Ivy League bowling skills that are apparently hurting him among women voters. There are at least three factors. Obama is suffering from his effete personality, feminists’ hard feelings about Hillary’s fate, and Obama fatigue.

Obama is an effetenik, a white teacup, pinkie-in-the-air sort. Hillary is more of a shot-and-a-beer guy than he is. Obama is a prig: a moralizer who lectures people, a rhetorician who suffers badly when, deprived of a teleprompter, he’s left to his own devices....

Obama, the organic liberal chicken, doesn’t want to be the main course on McCain’s dinner menu. He is, as Fred Thompson said, George McGovern without the experience. The Arugula Gap may well sink him in November.

“We were all pent up, and there was really negative energy,” said Wright, who caught a ride home with a neighbor at 11:30 p.m. Tuesday. “I would have much rather been at home than spending one more second there.”

Hey, now. What's going on?! Don't discriminate based on gender, teachers! If I were a teacher there, I'd be all about making the students feel that keeping them there made sense, and it was a good, camp-like situation, and I would want it to be something that they'd remember for the rest of their lives as a spontaneous and pretty nice occasion.

ADDED: Alternate interpretation: Maybe the school thought it was a good lesson for the young people to follow the "ladies first" tradition. In a situation where there is not enough food, who should stand back and allow others to eat? Perhaps every male — or every southern male? — should know to suffer some deprivation for the comfort of the females. But Mr. Wright hadn't gotten that message. If that was the lesson, the teachers on the scene should have communicated it, but perhaps that is not possible in a culture that has refrained from saying anything like that.

Wrote E.B. White, quoted in "A Pronouncing Dictionary of the Supreme Court of the United States" (PDF). The authors of that article went to a touching amount of trouble to get the correct pronunciation of the most-likely-to-be-mispronounced names of Supreme Court cases.

To be sure, this is an inexact process, not only because of the sheer passage of time, but also because some litigants may not have pronounced their own names in the way native speakers, or others, might deem correct. Where we have come across that information, we have followed the choice of the litigant. In some cases, pronunciations may even change during the course of litigation. Rumsfeld v. Padilla is an example. Two litigants with the same last name may also elect to pronounce it differently.

So wrote Allen Ginsberg, in the last line of his poem "America," which I'm thinking about this morning as I reflect on the State of the Union rhetoric. As long as I've compared that rhetoric to the work of one poet — Bob Dylan's "3 Angels" — the rules of blogging impel me to move on to the clear resonance with Allen Ginsberg. Obama said "shoulder to the wheel":

[F]or more than two hundred years, we have... placed our collective shoulder to the wheel of progress....

"One U-Haul trailer, a truck with no wheels/The Tenth Avenue bus going west/The dogs and pigeons fly up and they flutter around/A man with a badge skips by/Three fellas crawlin’ on their way back to work/Nobody stops to ask why...."

A Bob Dylan lyric that crosses my mind as I'm rereading point #5 of my "10 things I might have live-blogged, if I'd blogged the State of the Union Address last night." Something about "A man took the bus home from the graveyard shift, bone-tired" — on Obama's list of characters "today in America" — made me think of Bob Dylan's list of characters — and vehicles, including a bus — in "Three Angels." Dylan's song is about this "concrete world full of souls" who never notice the angels. Obama's text is much longer, so it's harder to say what it's "about." It has nothing about angels or other supernatural entities, other than the conventional "God," whom we're not asked to notice. He's asked to notice us: "God bless you, and God bless the United States of America. (Cheers, applause.)"

Obama does refer to "spirit," but it's the workaday can-do "spirit that has always moved this nation forward" and "the spirit of citizenship." The highest aspirations are repeatedly termed "dreams," as in that above-quoted line about the bone-tired man on the bus, which continues with the mind-reading "he's dreaming big dreams for his son." Just before the invocation of God, there's the 2-word imperative "Believe it," but the "it" is nothing religious. "It" is the "dream" of an American where "dreams" really do come true, if we keep "our eyes cast towards tomorrow." In Obama's America, we cast our eyes, aspirationally, and see, not angels, but a decent-enough job, if we work hard and take personal responsibility.

1. Most memorable line: "Are you going to have sex with me or do I have to rape you?" That's a paraphrase. Let me get the actual quote from the text. Obama said he had "a set of concrete, practical proposals," and "Some require congressional action, and I’m eager to work with all of you. But America does not stand still, and neither will I. So wherever and whenever I can take steps without legislation... that’s what I’m going to do."

2. The inanity of the congressional dress-up. Is every woman wearing bright red? As Obama squeezes in down the aisle, the backdrop of red looks like an array of military personnel from some European country, but it's just the congresswomen, bulging into the aisles. Of course, military personnel would clear a path, not make it more difficult for The Commander to walk by. The congressmen are less showily dressed. What choice do they have? If a male member wore anything other than a dark, neutral color, you'd think he's lost his mind, but the women seem to think they can't look crazy. "Shirley Temple is there," I said, spotting Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and being unfair to Shirley Temple, whose ringlets — as I do an image search this morning — look artlessly subtle and not at all like Debbie's headful of boing-y springs. Incredible what women can do to themselves and still be taken seriously. Respect the women! You'd better. Or else!

3. Obama kept kissing women. No selfies were taken, but what's with kissing so many women? "He should kiss some men," I said, and not because he's The First Gay President. He should kiss some men to establish that the kissing isn't sexual.

4. Meade announced "He looks high." I glanced up from the iPad game I was playing for the purpose of paying attention — solitaire — and noted the heavily drooping eyelids, then returned to my listen-only mode, with the audio in the room augmented by Meade's intermittent outbursts on the Obama-is-high theme, which fit the text, in ways that perhaps point #5 will make you see. If you're high. And, no, Obama said nothing last night about legalizing marijuana. And, also, Althouse and Meade were not high, not both of us or either of us. We were already talking and laughing as if we were. Artificial enhancement might tip us over into crying and despair.

5. Instead of talking about the government and anything related to his job or Congress's job, Obama begins by telling us about one American character after another, each described with irrelevant specificity. "An entrepreneur flipped on the lights in her tech startup...." Who the hell cares that the light was "flipped" on? Are we supposed to flip on with the excitement of your action verb "flipped"? This is why I don't read pulp novels. Characters continually commit actions that create a picture in your head, but it's always a dumb picture — flicking on light switches — and these details don't matter, don't connect to any meaning the author has to give. It's the opposite of turning on light. I can imagine the speechwriter deluding himself into thinking that this picture would somehow intrigue us, but it makes us feel that our time is being wasted. "An autoworker fine-tuned some of the best, most fuel-efficient cars in the world..." There's zero pretense that anybody checked to see if there really was that guy — "today in America" — doing exactly that. It's detail that is really the absence of detail. We're swimming in bullshit. "A man took the bus home from the graveyard shift, bone-tired" — no one noticed "bone" next to "grave"?! — "but dreaming big dreams for his son" — a deliberate allusion to Obama's autobiography title? I know he's trying to say This Is America. Like that's going to open us up for the paragraphs of policy that we know lie ahead.

6. The characters are more real when they're present in the room, like "Misty DeMars... a mother of two young boys." Okay, they really did find a person to represent this generality, and she's undeniably real. She's right there. But what does it mean that one particular lady got insurance? It's all worthwhile — all the clusterfuck of Obamacare — because Misty DeMars got insurance? And there's Estiven Rodriguez. Something about education happened to him, so that must mean something. I forget what. We got distracted by the way Obama's said "Rodriguez" — close to "Rod Regrets."

7. It's late, and we got tired, and we're on Central Time. I felt a little sorry for all those 50 and 60ish Congressfolk having to act excited that late at night. We were watching the speech on TV, and then I got it streaming on the mini-iPad, and we got in bed, each reading on iPads, while the mini, between us, blabbed on. Do those Congressfolk feel they're enjoying rare privilege, or do they wish they could be in bed too? I notice none of them seem to be wearing glasses, but they must need glasses, which means they are all wearing contact lenses. That must feel awful that late at night.

8. So much clapping. Clapping is quite an annoying noise, and this clapping happens and is going to happen so regularly, so exaggeratedly. The time-wastage is a constant, nagging presence. The speech is literally claptrap. Our legislative branch is trapped into clapping. At least the Democratic side. The judicial branch is represented, but they're trapped into not clapping. I see Roberts, Kennedy, and Kagan. (Kagan glowed red when Obama greeted her at the beginning.) I don't see Scalia, who once called the State of the Union "a juvenile spectacle" and said: "I resent being called upon to give it dignity…. It’s really not appropriate for the justices to be there." I, too, resent being called upon to give it dignity, not that anyone's calling on me, and I wonder if it's "appropriate" for a law professor to blog the SOTU into the indignity it deserves. Am I saying anything properly legal? If you don't think so, reread point #1 and dig the dignity of the lawprof blogger's concision.

9. With all the applause made the absence of applause stunning at the end the last thing he said about Iran. I said: "Wow!" at the time and made a mental note to check the text in the morning. It's: "If Iran’s leaders do not seize this opportunity, then I will be the first to call for more sanctions and stand ready to exercise all options to make sure Iran does not build a nuclear weapon. But if Iran’s leaders do seize the chance — and we’ll know soon enough — then Iran could take an important step to rejoin the community of nations, and we will have resolved one of the leading security challenges of our time without the risks of war."

10. The speech that began with a string of generically specific American characters ends with a long tribute to one character, present in the gallery, an Army Ranger named Cory Remsburg. He's already been on camera numerous times because he's sitting next to Michelle Obama (who, by the way, is wearing something that seems halfway between a 1950s little girl's party dress and an enlarged insect's carapace). There can be no dissent from solemn respect for Cory Remsburg, but are we to be bamboozled into thinking there can be no disrespect for this speech? Why is the President using Cory Remsburg as his shield from criticism, as he creaks to the end of this spectacle? Maybe everyone's so tired and so desirous of an end that we will be swept up into this it-must-be-the-last story — The Story of Cory — after which the applause must be so long and thunderous — because it must be bigger and louder than any of all the previous applauses — that we will have forgotten everything, as we dissolve into Dreams From My President.

But it's morning now, and I have the text. I can read where he bounced off the Army Ranger. Cory embodies the will and strength to fight back. It's not easy. "Sometimes we stumble; we make mistakes; we get frustrated or discouraged." Obama has stumbled and made mistakes, not that he directly admits it. Look there: It's Cory. But Cory didn't stumble and make mistakes. He did his duty, got injured, and kept going, doing what he, individually, needed to do. But he is appropriated to symbolize The People as a Whole. America as an entity moves forward: We have "placed our collective shoulder to the wheel of progress." The dismal old cliché put your shoulder to the wheel gets tricked up with the lefty words "collective" and "progress," and the workmanlike action verb "put" becomes the never-did-a-day-of-manual-labor word "placed." And now, we've gotta get out of this place, back into our individual lives, and I don't want to be in your collective, I'm tired of your "progress," and I've got my own wheels.

Why take the risk? The risk is only taken maybe once a week, but still: "The sloth is highly vulnerable on the ground and an easy prey for jaguars in the forest and for coyotes and feral dogs in the chocolate-producing cacao tree plantations that it has learned to colonize." The 2-toed sloth defecates from the tree, so why does the 3-toed sloth descend?

"In fact, during a written exchange that day in which I mentioned the tweet attack, he was more focused on giving me advice about a stye I had on my eyelid that I joked was probably a brain tumor: 'I agree, you probably do have a brain tumor. You should get your affairs in order quickly as those things can move rather rapidly. You’ll probably start to have some problems with your balance—don’t panic—it’s quite natural for a brain tumor.' He then counseled me not to use up my 'remaining days' fretting over Mia."

ADDED: "In 1969, at the age of 24, [Mia] became pregnant by musician/composer André Previn, 40, who was still married to singer/songwriter Dory Previn. The betrayal is said to have led to Dory Previn’s mental breakdown and institutionalization, during which she received electroconvulsive therapy. She would later write a song called, 'Beware of Young Girls' about Mia. Maybe sleeping with your friend’s husband doesn’t earn as many demerits as sleeping with your girlfriend’s adopted daughter, but if you’re waving the 'Never Forget' banner in Mia’s honor, let’s be consistent and take a moment to also remember the late Dory Previn."

Homosexuality is already illegal in the East African nation, and violence against the country's LGBT population has been steadily increasing since the Anti-Homosexuality Bill was first introduced in 2009, according to activists on the ground. When the legislation was first introduced in Parliament, it called for the death of anyone who committed "aggravated homosexuality," which included repeated "offenses," sexual relationships in which either person was HIV-positive, or any encounter that involved a minor.

Is that "example" or fiat? Since he's spending the taxpayers' money, he's not really an example, if what he's purporting to do is model behavior that private businesses could follow. They don't get to pay people with money raked in from the general populace.

But who's really getting a raise here? Do janitors and construction workers make minimum wage? Who are the minimum wage federal employees? How many are there?

Because if a kid asks you a question, you've got to give a straight, clear answer. And I love the way he elaborates in a way that a kid can relate to:

“It is a big job to do, to run for president...It would take traveling around the country, it would mean I’d be home less time, get to see my kids [for] less time. And the people in the media, they get meaner and meaner when you run for president because they pick you apart and say your clothes don’t look good, your hair looks bad, you need a haircut."

People get meaner and meaner! And they sure will tell you your hair looks bad. When I saw Paul on "Meet the Press" the other day, I observed that his hair was changing, becoming more normal, less ratty and goofy. Oh! I'm being mean. New media mean. All I mean is: I think he is going to run for President because I'm reading the tea leaves hair tendrils.

Well, great, because if people come at me looking like that lady wearing Google Glass at the link, I'm not going to want to talk to her. I hope I won't be accused of discriminating against the differently abled.

Now, it's going to be part of health-care, this augmentation by device. And we're all supposed to pool our money — build up the pool — while people tap it for their playthings.

Come on! This is so much worse than covering birth control. With birth control, you're staving off other costs that would take more out of the shared money pool. I know some opponents of the birth-control-coverage requirements of Obamacare think women ought to pay their own expenses if they choose to indulge in the kind of sexual pleasures that can result in pregnancy, but at least it's arguably bottom-line cost effective, and the group doesn't have the power to require women to avert pregnancy. Free birth control is an incentive to do something that saves the group money.

But what's with these tricky new computers becoming part of the health insurance system? You've got manufacturers scheming, marketing. And I'm predicting that they are leveraging male disaffection with the insurance system that seems to be making men pay for stuff for women. Here's something for the guys. They love their computers. The photo at the link is of a weird lady wearing Google Glass, but that's a trick to throw you off.

"... in generally unsuccessful attempts to match the presidential pageantry. The Republicans had 17 responders in 1968; the Democrats used to trot out 10 or 12 at a time in an attempt to match Reagan’s star power during the early 1980s."

It's Cathy McMorris Rodgers. Do you even know who she is? Do you think her diminuitiveness is appropriately augmented by having a second responder? That's what they're doing, those brilliant Republicans, who no, no, no are not having a war on women. There's a second SOTU response, from Senator Mike Lee — ostensibly on the theory that the Tea Party should have its own voice.

I sure hope America gets that, as opposed to thinking: Oh, there are the Republicans for you. They show you they actually have a woman, but then they bring out their real person, the pasty old white guy.

Don't tell me it would be wrong for people to take that message. The whole point of the SOTU response is messaging. Whatever message is received is the message. I'm tired of the explanations for all the poorly delivered messages from Republicans. They've got to improve their messaging.

His group The Weavers had been a success, with records like "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine" (1951), but getting called a communist — and actually being one — wrecked the commercial path forward.

Mr. Seeger was indicted in 1957 on 10 counts of contempt of Congress. He was convicted in 1961 and sentenced to a year in prison, but the next year an appeals court dismissed the indictment as faulty. After the indictment, Mr. Seeger’s concerts were often picketed by the John Birch Society and other rightist groups. “All those protests did was sell tickets and get me free publicity,” he later said. “The more they protested, the bigger the audiences became.”

By then, the folk revival was prospering. In 1959, Mr. Seeger was among the founders of the Newport Folk Festival. The Kingston Trio’s version of Mr. Seeger’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” reached the Top 40 in 1962, soon followed by Peter, Paul and Mary’s version of “If I Had a Hammer,” which rose to the Top 10.

Much more in the long NYT article at the link, including his education at Harvard; his encounter with the folklorist Alan Lomax, and, through Lomax, Lead Belly; his alliance with Woody Guthrie, traveling around playing for migrant workers in 1940; his WWII-era group the Almanac Singers, who played anti-war and then antifascist songs; campaigning for presidential candidate Henry Wallace in 1948; his central place in the great folk music revival circa 1960; playing "We Shall Overcome" at Civil Rights Movement rallies; and getting betrayed by Bob Dylan.

Imagine experiencing nearly a century of American history from such a central place. What a lucky man. Pete Seeger lived to be 94.

The University has cancelled classes today, but only for the morning. I don't remember ever seeing classes cancelled for coldness alone. But my class isn't cancelled. It's in the afternoon, when we are expected to hit 0.

So... believing the sentiments expressed in pop lyrics and the staged enactment of passion... that's the fresh approach? Well, sex sells better than advice about careful household budgeting, but why would it sell marriage? And assuming you can bamboozle the young folk into marrying with a hyped promise of fantastic, adventuresome, totally enthralling sex, isn't that laying the groundwork for divorce? But who believes the hype? Is anyone excited by excitement? Exciting people about excitement is a short term game.

That said, I remember being 14 and sold on the thrill of marital love by Sonny and Cher.

"... I recall thong flashing there," says WaPo's Ruth Marcus, noting the tendency of Republicans like Mike Huckabee and Rand Paul to portray women, "when it comes to sex and sexual activity," as "either innocent victims or... sexually promiscuous, slutty, low-life women." It should be that "women get to use sex and sexual activity and with that use contraception responsibly just like men do."

If young women are "conquering the world" (as Paul said), why not credit Monica Lewinsky with her conquest of the world's most powerful man? She was enthusiastic and willing, from what I read.

I had a problem with Rand Paul's talking about Lewinsky as a "young girl" who was taken "advantage" of. He acknowledged the importance of rules against sexual harassment, but for what I thought was the wrong reason:

I think the sexual harassment problem in the case of Bill Clinton has to do with other women who were pressured to have sex and with the women and men who were not in a position to improve their standing in the workplace by interacting sexually with the boss.

Lewinsky was young and seems really to have fallen in love with Bill Clinton, who blithely used her for his selfish amusement, but she was an adult and she made choices. As Ruth Marcus said, "women get to use sex... just like men." That's freedom. That's personal autonomy. And a lot of use goes on.

It's nice to hear Marcus plainly say that Clinton's use of Lewinsky was "a bad, bad thing," and I think some people really will feel that it's got something to do with whether he gets to reside in the White House again, even if it's counting the misdeeds of the man against the wife. When the wife is asking for the distinction of First Woman President, there's some sense in thinking about all of the relevant women issues.

I'd like to see Hillary run on the argument that she's the best. Don't do anything at all to get us hyped up about achieving another "first." Just be the best. It makes more sense, and it might be the easiest path.

"This time, they went too far. Rather than merely publishing a news story reporting that Plaintiff's screenplay may have been circulating in Hollywood without his permission, Gawker Media crossed the journalistic line by promoting itself to the public as the first source to read the entire Screenplay illegally."

Unbuilt websites... to clarify the context... and Ezra clarifies the context of nonexistence of the context clarifying. When there's nothing to explain, is it a criticism to say that nothing has been explained?

An aversion to paragraph breaks? That's my first thought on looking at Will Wilkinson's post bemoaning the loss of something that once was.

Why can't I just drain a little overflow off the top of my head at any given moment and move on? Will says:

The idea that the self is an “illusion” tends to be grounded on the false assumption that if the self is anything at all, it must be a stable inward personal quiddity available to introspection. But of course there is no such thing. The Zen masters are right.

Okay, so maybe a blog is a better representation of who you are and what life might be than any other form of expression, but Will's main problem seems to be that you can't do it right if you're doing it for money.

A personal blog, a blog that is really your own, and not a channel of the The Daily Beast or Forbes or The Washington Post or what have you, is an iterated game with the purity of non-commercial social intercourse.

What do the Zen masters say about purity? Hei Neng said: "If you cherish the notion of purity and cling to it, you turn purity into falsehood. Purity has neither form nor shape, and when you claim an achievement by establishing a form known as purity... you are purity bound."

If you're enjoying the Althouse brand of old-school blogging, please use the Althouse Amazon Portal. Perhaps you need some quiddity. Or Zen supplies.

... the internet is hinky this morning, at least from my frozen outlet. The -8 temperature might be icing it over, wrecking my flow. It's one of those days when I realize that I may have a successful blog, but somebody along the line gave me some help... Somebody helped to create this unbelievable World Wide Web system that has allowed me to thrive. Somebody invested in this series of tubes. I've got a blog, I didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.

And you, the reader, can make this post happen, by commenting here, perhaps from a less frozen outpost. From my iced-in place, I invite you to keep up the flow.

I'm reading this Juan Williams column at The Hill because it's titled "Williams: Time for Obama to punch hard," mainly because I'm interested in the phrase "punch back twice as hard," which the headline invokes.

Do you remember the origin of the phrase ? Obama opponents have been quoting it for a long time. Who started it? Obama, when first running for office, said "I want you to argue with them and get in their face," which isn't the same as a punch in the face, though it does recommend aggression (of the verbal kind). Of course, "punch back twice as hard" is also only a recommendation of verbal aggression, delivered with the verbal aggression of a physical violence metaphor.

Paul McCartney And Ringo Starr Reunited At The Grammys And It Was Adorable
The other two Beatles couldn’t be there, so they did Paul’s new song "Queenie Eye."

Paul McCartney — deemed "the cute one" since he arrived on the world stage a half century ago — is a 71-year-old man. "The other two Beatles couldn’t be there" because of the utterly unadorable reality of death. Ringo seems to be a nice enough man, but he's roped into appearing on stage while Paul plays his new song. That is, Paul has another record. He's an industrious musician who has consistently put out records over the decades and kept himself in the public eye one way or another, and this year presents a special opportunity, working The Beatles' 50th anniversary.

It's appropriate to include Ringo, who's also put out records over the years, and whose survival — he's 73 — makes it possible to augment Paul with a living human and call it "The Beatles," not that Paul wanted to play some old Beatles song for the occasion. And it's not as if Ringo and Paul haven't reunited before. Buzzfeed says: "This is the first time Ringo and McCartney have performed together since 2009." A 5 year gap. So what?

Back in the 1970s, there was always talk about whether The Beatles would get back together. It was an over-discussed topic that had gotten to be a pathetic wish and a failure to recognize the good work all 4 of them had done post-Beatles. I remember when John Lennon died, in 1980, the first thought that crossed my mind that wasn't completely sad was: That ends all the talk about whether there will ever be a Beatles reunion.

When The Beatles were together, in the 1960s, no one who cared about them gave a damn about The Grammys, which didn't seem to get rock and roll at all. The Record of the Year for singles released in 1964 was "The Girl from Ipanema" by Astrud Gilberto and Stan Getz. It was amazing that The Beatles' "I Want to Hold Your Hand" was even nominated, because no rock song had ever been nominated. The other nominees were "Downtown" (Petula Clark), "Hello, Dolly!" (Louis Armstrong), and "People" (Barbra Streisand). There was a term for what the Grammys rewarded back then: "easy listening." Or as I thought about it at the time: things that Cousin Brucie should not even play but did.

Having therefore always hated The Grammys, I'm not in tune with whoever watched The Grammys last night and have no idea what might seem "adorable" to them or why they would even want men in their 70s to be adorable... unless it's the way that young people patronize the very old. They're not that old.

January 26, 2014

First, Gregory started the interview with Mike Huckabee's gift to the Democrats, the statement that birth control coverage implies that women "cannot control their libido." Gregory asks Paul whether that's "helpful," and Rand Paul goes meta, saying "a lot of debates in Washington... get dumbed down and are used for political purposes," which is a way of saying Gregory's question is dumb. Then Paul jokes, "if there was a war on women, I think they won," and proceeds to talk about the women in his family, who are doing well, and the fact that women now outnumber men in law schools and med schools. He concludes that he doesn't see women as "downtrodden." They are "rising up and doing great things." In fact, he worries about men, "because I think the women really are out-competing the men in our world."

The Internal Revenue Service and several lawmakers are beginning to step up their interest in preventing “social welfare” organizations and other tax-sheltered groups from being used as political conduits, but they have encountered the usual resistance from Republican lawmakers. Considering how effectively the Koch brothers are doing their job, it’s easy to see why.

I'm also reading Maureen Dowd's new column, which begins, "So you want to get high in a high-end way in the Mile High City." (I can't believe we're not past "Mile High City" jokes, but I guess putting in another "high" — "high-end" — gives you a time extension on "mile high.")

There are some dismaying resort operations exploiting the aging Baby Boomers' urge to spend money getting some legal(ish) marijuana at long last, e.g., "Dale Dyke and his wife, Chastity Osborn, a massage therapist" who are turning their house into a bed-and-breakfast, replete with "a tether ball, a camera in the living room to Skype your friends stoned, an outdoor swing 'where you can have a good time and catch a buzz,' and 'maybe a nerf horseshoe court.'" Picture it. Did you picture it nude? Well, it's clothing-optional. The business plan is to charge guests for the room, then give the homegrown pot to them.

Robot thought bubble: Whew! I'm so glad you "have a mug of hot liquid [to] hold onto it as needed" instead of "smooth metal devices that fit comfortably into various bodily orifices."

And I say:

Actually, that double-wall glass is bad for hand-warming. I recommend a nice ceramic mug.

Maybe the devices for orifice warming should be ceramic...

And then I think about Meade's handiwork. You saw it here in May 2009, on one of those beautiful days before we were married, when I visited him in his little house in Ohio, the one with what Bissage called the "nicely scrubbed stove top." It looked like this:

"I love the tension between the ornate structure of the game and its improvisatory chaos, and I love the way great players find opportunity, even a mystical kind of order, in the midst of that chaos. The problem is that I can no longer indulge these pleasures without feeling complicit...."

From a NYT Magazine essay asking the question: "Is It Immoral to Watch the Super Bowl?" The question-asker is Steve Almond. Am I supposed to know who he is? (Is it immoral not to know?) There's no note about the author on the page and the name isn't a hot link. What's his moral authority?

Perhaps he wants his ideas judged by the strength of this one text, like an anonymous pamphleteer, but I Google his name and see that he's a short-story writer and that he was an adjunct professor in creative writing at Boston College who resigned in protest when Condoleezza Rice was brought in to do the school's commencement address. Moral authority noted.

The protocol involved exposing people to 60 F (15-16 C) air for two hours on day 1, four hours on day 2, and six hours on days 3-10. Although I assume they were lightly clothed, this is a pretty mild cold exposure.

Here in Wisconsin, where I'm only hoping for temperatures above zero and wind chills above the negative single digits, we set the thermostat at 60° so it's interesting to hear this called "pretty mild cold exposure."